Читать книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms - Страница 18

Geraldo Alfonso’s mother lived as a ghost in light and reflection, her soul pure energy made briefly visible if he did everything right, if he continued, night after night, his conjuring act. When dusk came and he clicked the wall switch, the interior of her small cottage glowed red, and she moved again through the ornately decorated, mirrored rooms on Catherine Street in Key West. She was even there at the end of his life, in 1998, after his childhood with her as a Santeria “Voodoo Queen”; after his time as a street percussionist in Cuban bands in the ’20s and ’30s; after his service in the navy during World War II; after his return to Key West from the war; after his short, tumultuous marriage and estrangement from his wife and son; after his defeated retreat back to the cottage to live with his mother, his one true love; after his depression.

He was fifty-seven when she died, and he had never made a piece of visual art until then.

That year a heaviness came. It had always been nearby, at the edge of his perception. Now it covered him like a veil, or was like a shadow stuck behind his eyes. He changed, people said.

He began to create a portal between the world of the living and the dead.

And in light, in reflection, in the hundreds of tiny mirror shards he glued to the walls and ceilings and floors, he could reunite with his mother, have his own image float across hers. He could hear her voice, feel her feminine power, and sometimes see the beams and glimmers of her spirit fling around the rooms of ceaseless glass as he paced through the house at night.

“Miracle Home,” he called it. Others would call it an “outsider art environment.” Neighbors called it strange. He devoted the final twenty-two years of his life to it, and it was all for her, so that she would keep talking to him, telling her stories, speaking in tongues, the way she did when he was a boy, when she and the other Santeria women on the street of small cottages sacrificed chickens for their blood and performed rituals to speak with the dead. His Miracle Home, he once told a reporter from the Spanish-language edition of The Miami Herald, gave him a reason for living.